Conspiracy! Westworld fan theory posits there’s more to Bernard’s interrogation than meets the eye
During last Sunday night’s new episode of Westworld, “Les Écorchés,” Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson) discovered that Bernard (Jeffrey Wright) is a host. She and her team promptly torture interrogate Bernard into telling them the location of Peter Abernathy’s (Louis Herthum) control unit. (They want it because it’s holding a ton of proprietary Delos data). Then, once Charlotte and Bernard are alone, with the QA team watching from behind a pane of glass, Bernard — now in analysis mode — tells Charlotte what she wants to know. Notably, we only see him mouth the words. She smiles, invites the QA team back inside, and has Bernard repeat his answer. Where is Peter Abernathy’s control unit? “Sector 16, Zone 4.”
The deliberate nature of the scene raised eyebrows, and the Westworld subreddit quickly began to question the nature of this reality. “The whole scene was weird to me,” noted georgiaphi1389. “Why make [Bernard’s answer] inaudible the first time we hear it? Was Bernard “faking” analysis mode? Why the hell is the security team standing outside in a place they can’t hear anything?”
Basically, a lot of fans are convinced that Bernard lied. GroundhogNight suggests one reason why:
"It’s to bookmark that scene in the viewer’s mind. If he just said it, that’s one thing. Fine.But when we don’t hear it, that exchange becomes bookmarked to the viewer because we want to know what was said. Even if we’re told a few seconds later, we’ll remember the exchange happened and was strange.That’s probably to make sure we remember this exchange when something significant happens. I’m guessing we’ll see it again, but with Ford standing there, pulling Bernard’s string. He’s setting up Delos."
To me, this answer makes the most sense. Earlier in the episode, we saw that Dr. Ford (Anthony Hopkins) had downloaded himself into Bernard’s brain, traveling alongside him as a passenger and taking full control of Bernard when the latter refused to act. The idea of him standing beside Bernard, speaking the lie through him, lines up with how we saw him manifest in Bernard’s place when he took control and shot members of the Delos QA team.
We know Ford started the host uprising and uploaded his consciousness to the Cradle so could help Dolores and her robotic brethren gain freedom from behind the scenes. So if he’s driving Bernard in this scene, he’s most likely luring Delos into a trap.
However, that’s not the only theory. Pgillooly thinks Charlotte Hale was manipulating Bernard:
"Hale programmed him to say what she wanted him to repeat. It’s a trap for Strand and team, clearly he was holding her under duress at that moment."
But why would Hale make Bernard lie about where to find the control unit? Yet another theory posits that she’s a double agent working for a “third party” company, and is trying to smuggle the data out for her employer. In that situation, throwing the Delos QA team off the scent would be to her advantage.
I don’t buy into that theory, though. We haven’t seen Hale act suspiciously in a way that would make us think she isn’t working for Delos. Sure, revealing her to be a double agent would be a twist, but if the show is as intelligent and clever as it thinks it is, it will have laid the groundwork for that twist before, and it hasn’t.
There’s also the chance, albeit slim, that this scene is exactly what it appears to be, and that Abernathy’s control unit is where Bernard says it is, and there are no traps awaiting the humans there…but where’s the fun in that?
Westworld continues on Sunday night with Episode 208, “Kiksuya.”
Next: Westworld season 2, episode 7 recap: “Les Écorchés”
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h/t The A.V. Club
